BMC Patrol Diagnose for Network & Systems Management
Background
BMC’s Patrol product had been successful for monitoring of individual servers and applications on those servers.
Business Problem
Patrol provided no built-in machinery to analyze enterprise-wide applications involving interactions between multiple servers, but customers needed this for multi-server applications like Microsoft Exchange. Customers needed to troubleshoot failures and performance problems, which inherently involved interactions of software on multiple computers at once. Also, Patrol provided no organized methodology or modeling tools for automating diagnosis -- everything must be custom-coded as a set of scripts -- which is not very practical for multi-server applications whose configuration may change fairly often.
Solution
BMC embedded CDG technology into some Patrol products, calling the new product line “Patrol Diagnose”. Please see the white papers on the BMC use of the Causal Digraph Technology (CDG).
Results
BMC rolled out the new product, first for Microsoft Exchange. It’s not yet clear if the market is strong enough for a diagnostic tool for Microsoft Exchange, so its future isn’t certain yet. With an extensive series of corporate acquisitions, BMC has had to focus on integrating all its new core businesses in any case, so has de-emphasized this product.
We fully productized the CDG-based technology at Gensym during collaboration with BMC (The beta version was developed first for Iridium.). The product is called SymCure. (See the white papers on CDG technology.)
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